Product Details

Editorial Reviews

When it comes to describing the world's oceans, "big" is bound to be one of the first words to come up. The planet is covered with more water than land, huge creatures dwell in the sea and some ocean dwellers travel vast distances through ocean waters. This book is full of big! For instance, a double page spread pictures big ocean mammalsseals, manatees, dolphins, whales and walruses. Then both pages fold out to a large four-page mural featuring these creatures drawn roughly to scale. A blue whale swims on four pages, a humpback occupies two, orcas leap across one page, and manatees, walruses, sea lions and seal look relatively small alongside. The author identifies and describes each huge animal: bottle nose dolphins are described as making whistling and clicking noises to signal each other, while sea lions often hunt in groups and eat fish, squid octopuses and crabs. Especially interesting are very small animals that are pictured as well, for example, barnacles that grow on humpback whales, and remora fish that swim alongside a white tipped reef shark feeding on parasites that might dwell on its skin as well as hitching a ride. Octopuses, squid and jellyfish can grow pretty big, toocheck out the colossal squid, Pacific giant octopus and lion's mane jellyfish, whose tentacles could stretch across a tennis court. Animals with shells include the giant clam, leatherback sea turtle, Atlantic lobster and Japanese spider crab with long legs that can measure thirteen feet from claw to claw. Fish include a beluga sturgeon that is not only long but long lived (would you believe about one hundred years?), a goliath grouper with a mouth so big that it can swallow prey whole, a whale shark plus a giant ocean sunfish. Wow! Not to be undone by size alone, the final pages feature biggest, fastest and longest: the narwhal has the longest tooth of any animal, the leatherback is the largest sea turtle, the sailfish is one of the fastest swimmers and so on. This book, with its sturdy pages and colorful illustrations, is a visual treatthe kind of "look at" book that offers new discoveries every time a young reader opens it. Reviewer: Judy Crowder